Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) eBook

has been known and sung by poets in all ages.
Its supremacy over the remainder of the starry host
is recognized in the name given it by the Arabs, those
nomad watchers of the skies, for while they term the
moon “El Azhar,” “the Brighter One,”
and the sun and moon together “El Azharan,”
“the Brighter Pair,” they call Venus “Ez
Zahra,” the bright or shining one par excellence,
in which sense the same word is used to describe a
flower. This “Flower of Night” is
supposed to be no other than the white rose into which
Adonis was changed by Venus in the fable which is
the basis of all early Asiatic mythology. The
morning and evening star is thus the celestial symbol
of that union between earth and heaven in the vivifying
processes of nature, typified in the love of the goddess
for a mortal.

The ancient Greeks, on the other hand, not unnaturally
took the star, which they saw alternately emerging
from the effulgence of the rising and setting sun,
in the east and in the west, for two distinct bodies,
and named it differently according to the time of its
appearance. The evening star they called Hesperus,
and from its place on the western horizon, fabled
an earthly hero of that name, the son of Atlas, who
from the slopes of that mountain on the verge of the
known world used to observe the stars until eventually
carried off by a mighty wind, and so translated to
the skies. These divine honors were earned by
his piety, wisdom, and justice as a ruler of men,
and his name long shed a shimmering glory over those
Hesperidean regions of the earth, where the real and
unreal touched hands in the mystical twilight of the
unknown.

But the morning star shone with a different significance
as the herald of the day, the torchbearer who lights
the way for radiant Aurora on her triumphal progress
through the skies. Hence he was called Eosphorus,
or Phosphorus, the bearer of the dawn, translated into
Latin as Lucifer, the Light-bearer. The son of
Eos, or Aurora, and the Titan Astraeus, he was of
the same parentage as the other multitude of the starry
host, to whom a similar origin was ascribed, and from
whom in Greek mythology he was evidently believed
to differ only in the superior order of his brightness.
Homer, who mentions the planet in the following passage:

“But when the star of Lucifer appeared,
The harbinger of light, whom following
close,
Spreads o’er the sea the saffron-robed
morn.”

(LORD
DERBY’S “Iliad.”)

recognizes no distinction between those celestial
nomads, the planets, “wandering stars,”
as the Arabs call them, which visibly change their
position relatively to the other stars, and the latter,
whose places on the sphere are apparently fixed and
immutable. In this he and his compatriots were
far behind the ancient Egyptians, who probably derived
their knowledge from still earlier speculators in Asia,
for they not only observed the movements of some at
least of the planets, but believed that Mercury and
Venus revolved as satellites round the sun, which
in its turn circled round our lesser world. Pythagoras
is said to have been the first to identify Hesperus
with Phosphor, as the